


love i can't express, confess to you

by 1derspark



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Andromache does not know how to say what she means, Angst, Fluff, Joe and Nicky play couples therapist, Miscommunication, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:49:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25563868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1derspark/pseuds/1derspark
Summary: Andromache has spent so much of the long millennia she’s been alive alone and afraid of the tongue in her mouth and what it could reveal.Only with Quynh can she finally speak, infrequently as she may. To Yusuf and Nicolo’s annoyance. With Quynh smiling and soft under her mouth, Andromache swears to do more, swears to speak aloud, and with great confidence.(Or Andromache takes a lesson from Yusuf and Nicolo in the art of love.)
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 18
Kudos: 244





	love i can't express, confess to you

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, so I literally have no idea what this is. I was supposed to be working on my longer Joe and Nicky fic today but I got distracted and this happened. Do with it what you will.
> 
> This is supposed to take place twenty or so years after Andromache and Quynh meet up with Joe and Nicky for the first time, so they're all still getting to know each other (in immortal terms of time).
> 
> No beta this time, P is busy, so all mistakes are mine. (I know I shift tenses a lot I'm sorry) If there are any glaring ones, point em out!

It’s late into the evening when Quynh comes back. 

Andromache, Yusuf, and Nicolo have long ago eaten their dinner, fish caught fresh from one of the marshy streams out beyond their main camp and roasted over the campfire, when there’s the telltale sound of a galloping horse in the dark.

Yusuf and Nicolo move to their swords immediately, are up, and side to side in a synchronized movement even Andromache is impressed by. It had taken her and Quynh many years to obtain that kind of trust and fluidity. Though these men had it as soon as she’d met them.

Still, they are children. Andromache’s had millennia to roam the world, much of it with Quynh, and in that time she’s memorized the way her lover rides a horse. How Quynh eases her mount into a gallop, the specific cadence of the hooves, how Quynh is always kind but firm with her steed.

Quynh comes out of the haze of the distance and rolls to a stop at their feet. The horse rears just a bit but only snorts. Gracefully, Quynh swings off, removes and drops the cloth hat she’d been wearing that held back her hair. 

Nicolo grabs for the reins of the mare, holds her close, and pats her cheek. 

“So?” he asks. “What did he say?”

Yusuf’s offered Quynh a clean rag, from where he got it Andromache has no clue, and Quynh wipes off the grime from her face with it. 

“Good things.” Quynh drops down onto one of the logs Andromache has dragged to the edge of the firepit for them all to sit on. Quynh reaches for one of the half-eaten fish on a stick, stuck into the sand, burnt from the licking of the fire. “The captain will take us. He said he needs more hands for another raid soon, and he’s picked the villages dry of their men.”

It’s good news for them, but Yusuf and Nicolo’s faces are drawn tight. Andromache cannot begrudge them it. A month they’ve been in the coastal region of China, making their way down the islands of Changguo County’s archipelago where a group of well-connected and powerful pirates have made a nest of themselves in the East Sea. 

Quynh has been making regular meetings with one of the lower-tier pirate captains at a tavern in the main port city, with hopes of getting into his good graces. Then she can secure them all positions on his ship, so they can uncover the head of this sea gang who’s done nothing but orchestrate the thieving and raping and pillaging of the coastal towns for the past year or so.

The natives are hesitant to speak of it, but they’ve seen the burnt down husks of villages, nothing but wreckages in the shifting sand. The beautiful terraced rice farms, of which China is known, uprooted and stolen out. The village children peering out from broken-down huts wide-eyed, clutching at the arms of their parents. Often the group could not pass a woman without her flinching and shying away, her fists drawn tight to her pants as if to keep them close to her skin. 

“His second isn’t too inclined to take in four strangers, let alone two Europeans and an Arab but luckily he’s not in charge,” Quynh said, nibbling at one of the fish bones.

“We will go in the morning then?” Nicolo asks.

“Everything’s set. We’ll meet him at dawn before the ship sets off.”

Andromache raises a hand. “Hold on. His second told you no?”

Quynh looks up at her eyebrows raised. “He did not. But I’d rather not repeat what he did say.”

There’s a spark in Andromache’s gut, one she knows very well. One that flickers in warning right before she’s hanged and or gutted by some foolish gaggle of men too intimidated or scared of her. 

Andromache kicks some sand onto the fire extinguishing it. Quynh rears back with her food, her nose scrunched up in the way it does when she’s perplexed and verging on snappish. 

“Then we’ll find another crew,” Andromache says. 

Quynh makes a gargled sound in her throat and stands. “You’re not serious.”

“I am. I won’t spend a month on some rat-ridden boat surrounded by an angry quartermaster and his crew who would rather see me skinned and hung from the side of the hull like an ornament.”

“Boss,” Yusuf says, warily. “I’m sure it’s not that bad. Quynh would not have us go unless she was sure we could handle it. And we’ve spent all this time waiting, one day more and its another village set on—”

“I know that,” Andromache snaps at him. It is the villages she’s thinking of. The people. But her family too. That’s what they are now. It’s not just her alone anymore, something that Andromache still often finds herself in awe of. She has three people to take care of, and love. 

And Quynh who fits the jagged edges of her body better than any sword. So forgive her if Andromache would prefer not to see any of them hung or dumped off the back of a ship no matter how many times they’ll come back from it.

She finds this hard to put into words. 

What comes out instead is, “We’ll ride south in the morning. Search for another ship to take us at their ports. They’ve been raiding more frequently down there anyway.”

“Bullshit!” Quynh spits. She stands nose to nose with Andromache, her face a blazing rage. Behind them, Yusuf and Nicolo watch wide-eyed, and unsure whether or not to intervene. 

“We’ve done all this work,” Quynh says. “ _I’ve_ done all this work and you do not get to throw it away on some overprotective self-centered sense of authority.” 

Oh is Quynh angry, the angriest Andromache has ever seen her maybe. Her breath is hot in Andromache’s face, she’s steaming with emotion and the sweat from her ride in the stifling heat. 

“We’ll go with or without you. I don’t care.” Quynh storms off into the high brush, leaving them all in a batch of baffled silence.

Nicolo recovers quickly. Without a word to her, but with a long and meaningful look to Yusuf of which Andromache could never begin to unpack, he mounts Quynh’s mare and goes on after her into the marsh. 

Andromache sighs, and sinks to the ground where she sits with her head between her knees. 

“I can tell you right now I’m not a woman to be lectured,” she says after a moment to Yusuf who has not moved. “It lost its effect on me a few thousand years ago.”

To his credit, Yusuf doesn’t try to disagree. All he does is shuffle down beside her and place something long and cool in her hands.

It’s a wine bottle. Rice wine, nice one too. From one of the fancier inns or brothels in the city port. 

“How did you get this?” she asks.

“Swiped it from some pissy silk trader in the market a few days ago. He was glaring at Nicolo.” Yusuf uncorks up the bottle, lets her drink, then opens up his hand once Andromache’s swallowed a mouthful.

“I thought Muslims didn’t drink.”

“Some do. Many don’t,” he answers. He swirls the bottle around in his hand, eyeing the liquor, then sniffing it with his nose wrinkled. “I’m not so sure that’s what I am anymore. Still, that doesn’t mean I don’t look like one.”

“I’m not ashamed of it Andromache. Do not mistake my meaning,” he says. “What I am or was has led me to the greatest gift of my life. And I would travel to all the edges of the world with him, no matter who we encounter, no matter who scoffs or gawks at us in a marketplace.”

“Those pirates would do more than stare,” Andromache says. 

“Probably. But who’s better to find out than us who cannot pay for it?” Yusuf reaches over and takes her hand. His palms are hard, weathered, the hands of a hard-fought man, but he’s gentle with her. 

“You and I, we would like to string up all the men in the world who would eye our lovers in marketplaces. You want to see Quynh safe, I understand. Maybe you should say this to her, instead of undermining all her hard work.”

Andromache swallows. For someone so young (in her eyes) Yusuf can see and understand many things about people. The flashes she’s seen of burned villages in her mind hold no candle to what she sees of Quynh, tied down and ripped apart by pirates for her betrayal. Should the captain’s second even wish it so, he could have Quynh slaughtered in ten different ways before the land disappears beyond the horizon. If the group’s true intentions were revealed, or should they displease the man in any way, it was Quynh who they’d take their fury to first. 

“I don’t understand you, Andromache,” Yusuf says. “I don’t think anyone does. For someone who has lived so long, you have not yet learned how to properly express yourself.”

“Maybe I don’t need to.” She takes the bottle again, downs some more with a flick of her wrist. “Not everyone professes their love out loud every two minutes.”

“Mock me, sure. But thirty years with my Nicolo and never has he been unaware of my love for him,” Yusuf says. He cocks his head, contemplating. “I’m not sure we’ve even had a real argument before. When we weren’t so intent on killing one another at least.”

Andromache snorts. These two. It isn’t in her nature, to love so openly and deeply as Yusuf might. To sleep plastered together as they do no matter the temperature. A few millennia into her long life and that will not change. She looks to the tall grass where Quynh disappeared, hurt, eyes flashing. 

Her gut twisted and roiled. She should apologize if nothing else.

“Go,” Yusuf says. There’s no question as to where. She feels a bit like a child, being told to kiss and make up by her mother. “Or you’ll drink yourself into a stupor and we have to be ready for the ship tomorrow.”

She looks, and in Yusuf’s eyes there is no room for argument. They are going, and she will say nothing against it. 

She inclines her head, an agreement, and parts the grass to begin her search.

It doesn’t take long. Five minutes maybe. Their little island hideout is not very big, but isolated, and perfect for them to make camp on. She follows the downtrodden path of crushed grass, the muddy imprints of a lady’s boots, and the curved tracks of horseshoes, heavy with a rider. 

Soon she comes upon voices. The grass thins and then she is on the bank of a small straight separating their island and the next. Quynh sits, knees drawn up to her chest just before the water, Nicolo snug by her side whispering and smiling while the mare he rode on grazes on the far edge of the clearing.

They look up when she steps out of the grass. Quynh narrows her eyes but softens when Nicolo gives her arm a squeeze. He rises and with a whistle to the mare, who heads right on over, he walks over to meet her.

“Be kind, Andromache,” he says. “You love and are loved in return.” He kisses her cheek, those gray eyes of his bright, shining with a knowledge far beyond his years. “Do not forget that.”

He leaves with the horse then all there is is the moonlight and the sounds of the swamp. Quynh who watches her every step until Andromache sits by her in the dirt and brushes an errant curl of black hair behind Quynh’s ear. 

“Would you have me do all the talking Andromache,” she says. It’s more than a little bitter, tinged with exhaustion. From the day, from the never-ending push and pull they have between them.

“Maybe. You’re the people person, not me.”

“I’m not _people_ Andromache. Not to you,” she says, voice laced with a tired kind of pain. “Is it so hard for you to say what you mean to me? You and I both know we could kick the shit out of a crew of bigoted mediocre pirates, with or without the lovesick pair back at camp.”

Andromache smiles. She’s being lectured, and she hates being lectured, but it’s good to be close to Quynh and hear her voice. 

What would she be if she could never hear it again? 

Andromache will see herself somehow dead before she lets any more pain fall upon Quynh. Quynh who is her first, her water well in the desert, chap-lipped and dying but all the more beautiful for it. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I love you and I’m sorry. I have no excuse and nothing else to say but that. I’m a pig-headed woman who loves you. Tomorrow we will go to the captain and his second, all of us, and I’ll slaughter them all should he even look at you funny.”

Quynh’s laughing when she leans in for a kiss. It’s thick and cloying as the air about them. It feels as if it's been ages since they’ve embraced since they’ve brushed hands since they’ve done anything. Andromache has spent so much of the long millennia she’s been alive alone and afraid of the tongue in her mouth and what it could reveal.

Only with Quynh can she finally speak, infrequently as she may. To Yusuf and Nicolo’s annoyance. With Quynh smiling and soft under her mouth, Andromache swears to do more, swears to speak aloud and with great confidence. 

Kissing Quynh she feels like all the secrets she holds have been hollowed out and divided for recompense. This is why she loves her, this is why they are who they are, together they shoulder the outpour of the world. Each of them is a balm to the many horrors they bear. 

In the buzzing night of an eastern moon, they kiss and kiss and for an evening the immortality falls off their shoulders, into the water, and leaves them raw. Unburdened, human, they are reduced to simplicity; two women connected in the shrouded mist.

**Author's Note:**

> Come check me out on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/1derspark)!
> 
> As always kudos and comments are appreciated <3


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